So you've
set up your own NAS, and you'd like it to download more than just the occasional torrent. If you'd like to automatically download TV shows as soon as they're available with previously mentioned Sick Beard, you can install it to your NAS for an always-on internet PVR.

Video content is readily available online for you to download, but the download process isn't…
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If you'd rather not keep your main machine on all day waiting for new TV shows to download, installing Sick Beard on a NAS is a fantastic way to automatically download your favorite TV shows, whether your other computers are already on or not. However, installing SABnzbd and Sick Beard to a NAS takes a bit more work than installing it to a normal computer. Here's how to do it.

Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media, giving you speed and…
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Once you've read all those guides closely, continue with the steps below to install SABnzbd and Sick Beard on your NAS.

Installing SABnzbd

SABnzbd, as you know, is the program we use to actually download files from Usenet. Installing it in FreeNAS is all done from the Terminal. You can either do this from your FreeNAS box itself, or by SSHing into it from another computer (which I prefer).

To SSH into your NAS, either
download PuTTY for Windows or open up a Terminal in OS X. In PuTTY, just type in the IP address of your NAS on the main page and hit Open. You'll want to log in as root and type in the password you created for yourself when you set up the NAS. If you're on OS X, type this command into the Terminal and hit Enter.

ssh -l root 192.168.0.10

Where
192.168.0.10 is the IP address of your NAS. Then, follow the instructions below.

Step One: Create the Necessary Folders

We can't actually install these programs directly onto the same drive as FreeNAS, so we're going to install it on one of the drives in our NAS. In my case, I installed it on the same drive where I store all my movies and TV shows, in a folder called "Extensions". My media drive is called SEAGATE, so whenever you see that in the commands below, replace it with the mount name of your own drive.

To start, we're going to create the folders we need to get SAB up and running. Run the following commands in the terminal, hitting Enter after each one:

Next, head back to the FreeNAS web interface, go to Access > Users and Groups, and click on the Groups tab. Create a group named
sabnzbd. This will allow SABnzbd to access its necessary download folders.

The permissions you use for your folders are up to you, but this is what I use.
See our guide to permissions in Linux and BSD for more information on how these work—you may need to add your FreeNAS user to the group "sabnzbd" if you want to access that Downloads folder over the network.

Step Two: Install the SABnzbd Packages

Next, we're going to actually install SABnzbd on our system. If you have any trouble, double check this page and make sure the following commands' version numbers are all up to date, as these things can change over time.

If you're using a 64-bit version of FreeNAS, change i386 to amd64 in the first command. Note that the URL will be different depending on your version of FreeNAS/NAS4Free, so you may have to root through http://ftp6.us.freebsd.org/pub to find the right URL for you.

If this all worked with no errors, you can install SABnzbd itself with:

Obviously, replace the commands above with a
later version of SABnzbd, if one exists. Lastly, you'll want to change the Python directory in SABnzbd's python script. Run the following command:

nano /usr/local/share/SABnzbd-0.6.8/SABnzbd.py

and on the first line, change
#!/usr/bin/python to #!/usr/local/bin/python. Hit Ctrl+X to exit, and confirm the save with Y. Congratulations! SABnzbd is now installed on your system.

Step Three: Set SABnzbd to Start Up With Your NAS

You probably won't reboot your NAS often, but we're going to set a few startup and shutdown commands to keep SABnzbd running whenever your NAS is. Head into FreeNAS' web interface and go to System > Advanced > Command Scripts. Click the plus sign and add these two commands as "PostInit" commands:

After you've restarted, head to
http://192.168.0.11:8085/sabnzbd in your browser, replacing 192.168.0.11 with the IP address of your NAS. If everything went well, the SABnzbd web interface should pop up, ready for you to add NZBs to download!

Lastly, head back into the FreeNAS web interface add the following command alongside the others, only this time as a "Shutdown" command:

where USER is your is your SABnzbd username, PASS is your SABnzbd password, and APIKEY is your SABnzbd API key, which you can find in SABnzbd's web interface under Config > General.

When you set up SABnzbd, you'll need to enter your download folders in absolute format, that is starting with /mnt/. For example, your "Complete" folder should be
/mnt/SEAGATE/Downloads/Complete instead of just Complete. In addition, you'll want to set the permissions of your completed downloads to 0770 so you can access them. For more information on how to set up SAB, check out our original guide to getting started with Usenet.

Installing Sick Beard

Like SABnzbd, we're going to install Sick Beard through the terminal. These instructions assume you already installed SABnzbd on the NAS, so follow those instructions before these. Either hook a keyboard up to your NAS or SSH into your NAS as described above, and follow the steps below to install Sick Beard.

Step One: Create the Necessary Folders

We're going to install Sick Beard in the extensions folder we created when we installed SABnzbd. You'll want to create a folder inside extensions for Sick Beard:

cd /mnt/SEAGATE/extensions
mkdir sickbeard
chmod 770 sickbeard

Again, if you prefer stricter permissions, you can edit the
chmod command accordingly.

Step Two: Install Sick Beard

To download and extract the latest version of Sick Beard, just run the following commands:

You should be able to access it from any browser by going to
http://192.168.0.11:8081/home, replacing 192.168.0.11 with the IP address of your NAS.

Step Three: Set Sick Beard to Start Up With Your NAS

Like SABnzbd, we're going to start up Sick Beard with the NAS and shut it down when your NAS does. Type the following commands to edit Sick Beard's shut down script:

cd /mnt/SEAGATE/extensions/sickbeard
nano sd.sh

Paste the following code into the editor that appears, replacing your IP address on the first line, your Sick beard username on the second line, and your Sick Beard password on the third line (you can create a username and password for Sick Beard from its web interface):

Now you're done! SABnzbd and Sick Beard will start up with your NAS, and you can control them both from any computer in the house. Remember, as you set up Sick Beard, to use absolute file paths in all the settings—like
/mnt/SEAGATE/Downloads/Complete instead of just Complete—otherwise you'll run into a wall where SAB and Sick Beard won't know where to save your files.

Finishing Touches

I won't go into how to use SAB and Sick Beard here, because once again, we've done a lot of that before.
Check out our Usenet guide for more info on using SABnzbd, and our Sick Beard guide to using Sick Beard. I also highly recommend checking out this Sick Beard guide from our friends over at the How-To Geek—they go into a lot of detail about how to send TV shows from Sick Beard to SAB, and even how to integrate XBMC. It's a really great help to those getting started.

If you end up using the
sabtosickbeard.py script in Sick Beard, as described in the guide at How-To Geek, make sure you edit sabtosickbeard.py in your favorite text editor (you should be able to access it from any computer through Windows Explorer) and change the first line to:

#!/usr/local/bin/python

And be sure to
check out Roger's original Sick Beard guide if you have trouble getting it set up on the NAS. It seems very long and complicated, but as long as you enter the terminal commands correctly, it shouldn't actually give you much trouble. Once again, I've edited this post a little bit for clarity, but all the credit goes to Roger, who figured it out and wrote the original guides. If the instructions work for you, head over there and give him a shout out in the comments to thank him.